Improving the scalability and performance of SANsymphony-V R9.0.4, combined with its ability to work across multiple storage platforms, ensures the application continues to be at the forefront of the push toward software-defined storage, said Augie Gonzalez, director of product marketing for Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.-based DataCore.

SANsymphony-V hides the nuances of storage in multivendor environments with a single application that brings advanced functionality to arrays that previously did not have them, Gonzalez said.

"It's a new approach to storage actually introduced by the biggest storage vendor, EMC and its ViPR," he said. "Before that, no hardware guys would bring up the idea of doing something outside the array. It was a big taboo. Now they're saying they can do it. It plays right into the hands of DataCore."

DataCore is delivering on the concept of software-defined storage, said Dan Molina, CTO of Nth Generation Computing, a San Diego-based solution provider and long-time DataCore partner.

"DataCore is very server-agnostic and storage-agnostic," Molina said. "It provides enterprise-grade storage across any platform. SANsymphony-V can give any storage device like an X-IO ISE device or a Hewlett-Packard MSA2000 array enterprise-class functionality."

The new version of SANsymphony-V doubles the maximum number of nodes, which are industry-standard servers that can address a common pool of storage, to 16 nodes, Gonzalez said. The next version of SANsymphony-V will double that maximum again, he said.

"Businesses are spreading out their infrastructure to put data closer to the computing resources," he said. "This is causing a major push on scale-out storage. SANsymphony-V segregates the quality of service by separating what appears to be one pool of storage across multiple nodes."

That doubling of scalability is huge, Molina said. "You can now support any enterprise with that kind of scalability," he said. "And because DataCore uses its own clustering technology, we know it's been tested thoroughly."